Air freight continued to stagnate in July with a fractional 0.4% decline as world trade stoppedgrowing, according to figures released today by the International Air Transport Association
(IATA).Both international and domestic air freight traffic declined by 0.4% in terms ofrevenue-tonne-kilometres, the IATA figures showed. Airline cargo load factors worsened due to the3.6% increase in available capacity and dropped back by 1.8 percentage points to the pre-recessionlevel of 45.0%.
Over the first seven months of 2011, air freight was just 1% higher than the same period lastyear, with 1.5% growth for international traffic and a 1.9% fall for domestic volumes. Total marketcapacity was 5.6% higher in the January-July 2011 period and the overall load factor was 46.2%.
The nature of the weakness in the air freight market has changed, IATA pointed out. “In 2010,airlines were losing market share to other modes of transport as world trade expanded. Theearthquake and tsunami in Japan, coupled with the general economic gloom are now the main drivingfactors of continued weakness,” the airline association commented. “Now that international tradehas stopped growing, a strong near-term renewal in air freight growth seems unlikely,” it wrote inits latest market analysis.
In regional terms, Asia-Pacific carriers continued to show the weakest freight performance witha 3.6% decline compared to July 2010. Asia-Pacific carriers, the largest in the market, have seenload factors slip to 58.1% (from 60.2% in July 2010). While the region suffers from a majorimbalance with strong outward flows of manufactured goods and weak inbound traffic, the scale oftheir home carrier operations allows for better capacity utilisation, IATA noted.
In contrast, Middle East and Latin American carriers showed the strongest performance with gainsof 8.4% and 8.2% respectively in July. North American airlines had 1% freight growth while theirEuropean counterparts had a collective 0.7% drop in freight traffic.
